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How to argue for pragmatic encroachment

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Abstract

Purists think that changes in our practical interests can’t affect our knowledge unless those changes are truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. Impurists disagree. They think changes in our practical interests can affect our knowledge even if those changes aren’t truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. I argue that impurists are right, but for the wrong reasons, since impurists haven’t appreciated the best argument for their own view. As I show, there is an argument for impurism sitting in plain sight that is considerably more plausible than any extant argument for impurism.

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Notes

  1. By ‘truth-irrelevant properties,’ I mean exactly what DeRose means (2009: p. 25): properties that don’t affect the probability that the belief in question is true, either from the point of view of the person who holds that belief or from any more objective point of view.

  2. Cf. Roeber (2018a, p. 1).

  3. As I’m using the word ‘intuitive,’ our intuitive reactions to cases report how these cases initially strike us. They needn’t report our settled opinions about these cases, and may even conflict with our settled opinions. The skeptical paradox helps illustrate the distinction. In the relevant sense of ‘intuitive,’ I find each of the following simultaneously intuitive: (a) that I know that I have hands, (b) that I don’t know that I’m not a disembodied brain in a vat, and (c) that if I know that I have hands, then I do know that I’m not a disembodied brain in a vat. My settled opinion is that, since (a) and (c) are true, (b) must be false. But while my settled opinion is that (b) is false, I still find (b) intuitive, in the relevant sense. Throughout this paper, whenever I use the words ‘intuition,’ ‘intuitive,’ etc., I will be using them in this sense.

  4. These cases come originally from DeRose (1992).

  5. See, for example, Buckwalter (2010), May et al. (2010), Feltz and Zarpentine (2010), Schaffer and Knobe (2013), Phelan (2014), Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015), Turri (2017), and especially Rose et al. (2017).

  6. Encroachment cases are a species of what I call ‘encroachment scenarios’ in Roeber (2018b). Specifically, encroachment cases are just encroachment scenarios where practical interests are the truth-irrelevant factors in question.

  7. Throughout, when I talk about answering the question whether hawks are raptors, I won’t mean forming or holding any belief about the answer to this question. Instead, I will mean performing some action (saying ‘yes,’ pressing a button marked ‘yes,’ or something like that).

  8. The relevant probability will presumably be either your subjective probability (credence) that hawks are raptors or some epistemic probability that they are. It will not be the objective probability that hawks are raptors.

  9. I’m not here denying the material conditional if you know that hawks are raptors, then answering ‘yes’ has the highest expected utility of your options (cf. Weatherson 2012). Instead, at this point, I’m merely denying the strict conditional if hawks are raptors, then answering ‘yes’ has the highest expected utility of your options and pointing out that, because this conditional is false, you can’t know that it’s true.

  10. Again, I’m assuming that skepticism is false. (Skepticism entails that DGI and KGI are both true, since it entails that the consequent of DGI is true in every possible world while the antecedent of KGI is false in every possible world).

  11. Here and throughout, I am using ‘you may’ as shorthand for ‘it is false that you should not’.

  12. While I know that hawks are raptors (at least as I sit here typing at my computer), I don’t know what credence I have in this proposition. I know it’s pretty high, and I know it’s also lower than (say) my credence that 1 = 1, but this is about all I know. There’s no value of ‘x’ for which I can be anywhere near certain that my credence in this proposition is exactly x.

  13. Note that, because purists think you know that you will only make things worse by doing what this argument says you are rationally required to do, purists cannot respond to this puzzle by saying (along with Broome 2007) that the requirements of rationality take wide scope.

  14. Cf. Roeber (2014, §7).

  15. Thanks to Jennifer Lackey, Baron Reed, Sandy Goldberg, Robert Audi, participants at a 2015 Northwestern Epistemology Brownbag, the students in my graduate seminar on pragmatic encroachment, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA

    Blake Roeber

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Roeber, B. How to argue for pragmatic encroachment. Synthese 197, 2649–2664 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1850-4

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